“Reality is neither Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Advaita Vedanta, nor Buddhist. It is neither dualistic nor non-dualistic, neither spiritual nor nonspiritual. We should come to know that there is more Reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our thoughts and ideas about Reality. When we perceive from an undivided consciousness, we will find the sacred in every expression of life. We will find it in our teacup, in the fall breeze, in the brushing of our teeth, in each and every moment of living and dying. Therefore we must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence and intuitive awareness, beyond where all paths end, to that place of sacredness where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually.”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

“Discover a deeper sense of ‘home’ as being the very being that you are, wherever you go. And wherever you are in the world is also your manifest being. As your experience of your formless being and your being as the manifest expression of all of life deepens, you will feel more at home wherever you are. In a sense, you never go anywhere—the scenery just changes.”

“Meditation is not something restricted to times of formal seated meditation; it is most fundamentally an attitude of being—a resting in and as being. Once you get the feel of it, you will be able to tune into it more and more often during your daily life. Eventually, in the state of liberation, meditation will simply become your natural condition.”

“Breathe in and be aware of your body and look deeply into it and realise you are the Earth and your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth. Not to cut the tree not to pollute the water, that is not enough. We need a real awakening, enlightenment, to change our way of thinking and seeing things. You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you…” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

“When you aren’t waiting for anything to happen, there is a natural sinking and deepening into the source of your own being. It’s very quiet, and then, and only then, do you start to sense presence. There is a very palpable presence in this quiet. That is why I said this is not a dead quiet. You can sense an aliveness. It’s a presence that’s inside your body and outside your body. It permeates everywhere. When you are looking for it, you are looking for a gross presence, a heavy presence to hit you over the head. This isn’t going to happen. The true quiet is a brightness. You feel bright. There is an awakeness, a deep sense of being alive.”

“You’ve made up the whole thing… The mind is dreaming. It tells itself stories and wants to know if you’re progressing. When you shift into wakefulness, you realize, “Wait, it’s a dream. The mind is creating an altered state of reality, a virtual reality, but it’s not true — it’s just thought.”

Thought can tell a million stories inside of awareness, and it’s not going to change awareness one bit. The only thing that’s going to change is the way the body feels. If you tell yourself a sad story, the body reacts to that. And if you tell yourself a self-aggrandizing story, the body feels puffed up, confident.

But when you realize it’s all stories, there can be a vast waking up out of the mind, out of the dream. You don’t awaken, what has eternally been awake realizes itself. That which is eternally awake is what you are.”